At school I was taught to admire Plato and Aristotle, who recommend sodomy to youths. I am not so rebellious as to oppose their dictum

Aleister Crowley, Sodomy in The World’s Tragedy

Consider also:

  1. “One man tells how the theatre and the library were at their foundation but part of a scheme the future is to fulfil. To them will be added a school where speech, and gesture, and fencing, and all else that an actor needs will be taught”
  2. “It is, of course, common knowledge that great secret systems of the Mysteries (referred to in, our lectures as ‘noble orders of architecture,’ i.e., of soul-building) existed in the East, in Chaldea, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Italy, amongst the Hebrews, amongst Mahommedans and amongst Christians; even among uncivilized African races they are to be found. All the great teachers of humanity, Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Moses, Aristotle, Virgil, the author of the Homeric poems, and the great Greek tragedians, along with St. John, St. Paul and innumerable other great names–were initiates of the Sacred Mysteries.”
  3. “I shall fight openly for that which no living Englishman dare defend, even in secret — sodomy!”
  4. “I love you now again with an undivided song. Because I can never love you, I cannot do you wrong. I saw in your dying embraces the birth of a new embrace; In the tears of your pitiful faces, another Holier Face. Unknowing it, undesiring, your lips have led me higher; You have taught me purer songs that your souls did not desire; You have led me through your chambers, where the secret bolt was drawn, To the chambers of the Highest and the secrets of the Dawn! You have brought me to command you, and not to be denied; You have taught me in perfection to be unsatisfied; You have taught me midnight vigils, when you smiled in amorous sleep; You have even taught a man the woman’s way to weep.”
  5. “These Mysteries were formerly taught, we are told, ‘on the highest hills and in the lowest valleys,’ which is merely a figure of speech for saying, first, that they have been taught in circumstances of the greatest seclusion and secrecy, and secondly, that they have been taught in both advanced and simple forms according to the understanding of their disciples.”